In the peak of summer, as Operation Gideon’s Chariots (launched in May 2025) entered its second month, news emerged that the Israeli army had bombed Gaza’s only Catholic church, the Church of the Holy Family, on July 17. The strike killed three people—a relatively small number in a territory where daily fatalities range between 40 and 70—but it drew attention across, where many governments had assumed that Christian sites and communities would be spared the violence by religious or diplomatic convention.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) described the church bombing as collateral damage and quickly closed the case, but the explanation did little to reassure either the small Christian community in the Holy Land or their co-religionists abroad. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Jewish settlers attacked Taybeh—the only Palestinian village with a Christian majority. Home to about 1,500 residents from Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Melkite Christian communities, Taybeh is located near Ramallah and features on Christian pilgrimage routes. Traditionally identified with the biblical “Ephraim” in the Gospel of John (11:54), where Jesus withdrew after raising Lazarus, the village is often seen as a symbolic cradle of Christianity in the region.
On July 14, Jewish settlers from four outposts established around Taybeh in 2024 (Ofra Southeast, Amona Farm/Mizpe Roim, Or Ahuvia/Maoz Ester B, and Kochav ha-Shahar West) set fire to St. George’s Church and its adjacent cemetery. They reportedly returned on July 28–29, torching cars and painting racist graffiti on homes in an effort to intimidate residents. In response, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, and the Latin Patriarch, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, issued a rare joint statement describing the attacks as the main threat to the continued Christian presence in the region. They emphasized the gravity of the IDF’s failure to intervene, with Pizzaballa further identifying settler violence as the leading cause of Christian emigration from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where only about 50,000 Christians remain today—compared to 160,000 in Israel, though that number has also been in decline.
Incidents targeting Christians increased after October 7, 2023, with the launch of the Gaza offensive. On October 19, 2023, the IDF bombed the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius in Gaza, killing 18 people and irreparably damaging the Strip’s oldest church, dating back to the 5th century CE. The church had also served as one of the few relief centers providing food and medical care to both Christian and Muslim families. Since then, attacks on Christians have occurred with greater frequency. By October 2024, the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, a U.S.-based NGO in Jerusalem, had documented 111 cases of assaults by Jews against Christians, ranging from spitting, pepper-spray attacks, and beatings to vandalism of church property, desecration of religious symbols and cemeteries, and obstruction of access to places of worship.
Christians, however, are far from being the main target of Israeli settler violence, which overwhelmingly affects Muslims and often with more lethal consequences. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), settlers have carried out more than 1,000 attacks in 230 West Bank communities since the beginning of 2025, resulting in 11 deaths and 700 injuries.
In total, between October 7, 2023, and today, 775 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, reflecting a marked escalation in violence.
In Gaza, in addition to the 65,000 deaths reported by Hamas’ Ministry of Health—a figure no longer disputed by Israeli authorities—Israel has been accused of deliberately destroying hundreds of archaeological, cultural, and religious sites, reflecting both the intensity of the military campaign and the political will to eradicate the territory’s historical memory. According to the Middle East Monitor, Israel caused “intentional damage to eight museums, including those in Rafah and Khan Younis in southern Gaza, to dozens of mosques, including the Great Omar Mosque in Gaza City, to archaeological sites in Gaza City, and to 21 cultural centers.”
Among the landmarks destroyed was the Rashad Shawa Cultural Center, named after a former Gaza mayor from the 1970s. Its brutalist concrete design had become a symbol of the Strip and was once envisioned as the site of a future Palestinian parliament in the event of a Hamas–PNA reunification. The most significant loss, however, was the Great Omar Mosque, built on the foundations of a Byzantine church that had itself stood atop an ancient Philistine temple. Converted into a mosque by the Mamluks in the 13th century and later renovated by the Ottomans in the 16th, it embodied Gaza’s long historical and cultural layering—until its destruction in 2023.
Israeli historian Dotan Halevy, a specialist in Gaza’s urban history, argued that the most significant damage was less visible: the loss of intangible heritage, including thousands of manuscripts and volumes from the Omar Mosque’s library, which had been in the process of digitization through the British Council-led “Endangered Archives Project.” Alon Arad, executive director of the Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh, which works on the politicization of archaeology in the conflict, acknowledged that “since Israel announced the destruction of the Hamas regime, this has extended to government buildings and symbols of culture and governance. These places are fundamental for identity building. They are sources of personal and national pride.”
Since October 7, UNESCO has verified damage to 110 sites. What Arad and others suggest is that Israel is engaging in a form of “culturicide”—a recent term inspired by Lemkin’s 1944 concept of “genocide,” used to describe the targeted destruction of a people’s cultural heritage through mortars, missiles, and bulldozers. The idea builds on earlier formulations: in 2009, Oxford scholar Karma Nabulsi coined “scholasticide” to describe attacks on Palestinian schools and universities, repositories of collective knowledge. Emek Shaveh, the Israeli NGO, has similarly warned that the IDF is applying “much more permissive criteria (in Gaza). We see widespread destruction. Historical sites are no exception.” The group stresses that this poses a serious challenge for any future reconstruction or coexistence, since “the Palestinian state is losing crucial resources, part of its identity, and a local economy based on culture and tourism.” These voices, however, remain marginal within Israel, where the anger of settlers and the momentum of the military, bent on erasing every trace of Palestinian heritage, dominate the response.
Where does this presumption of righteousness—this fundamentalist drive to eliminate the other—originate? Whether the target is a Palestinian civilian in Gaza labeled a Hamas supporter, or a Christian in Taybeh dismissed as a goy, a foreigner, and an obstacle to annexation, both forms of violence—in Gaza and the West Bank, against Christians and Muslims alike—stem from the same root: the rise of Jewish fundamentalism within Israel. Though still a minority (religious Zionists make up 24–28 percent of Israel’s 7.76 million Jews, depending on self-definition, according to Israel in Figures–Rosh Hashana Selected Annual Data 2025), they have come to shape all the strategic decisions of the Netanyahu government and dominate public debate. Central to their worldview is the conviction that Israel’s military conquests since 1967 advance the redemption (ge’ulah) of the ancestral land, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River—Greater Israel—as prescribed in biblical prophecy (Leviticus 25:23). Any obstacle, whether “terrorists” or “foreigners,” is thus seen as impeding God’s plan and must be removed.
Paradoxically, these ideas now shape government policy, even as Israel continues to present itself as the Middle East’s only democracy. Their influence has been reinforced by the Prime Minister and his majority party, Likud, which share many of the same assumptions. As early as 2010, Netanyahu granted “national historical heritage” status to two Jewish religious sites in the Occupied Palestinian Territories—the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem—stating that Israel’s existence “does not depend only on the IDF or our economic resilience, but is rooted in the national sentiment we transmit to future generations and in our ability to justify our connection to the land.” It is precisely this connection that religious Zionists now emphasize: the land, they argue, belongs exclusively to Jews.
In 2010, the influence of Jewish fundamentalism on mainstream Israeli thought still seemed limited; today, it has become clearly dominant. A 2020 study on the role of Religious Zionist ideas in Israeli school curricula, based on an analysis of the Ministry of Education’s “planning, management, and organization package” (MATANA), concluded that “the ministry promotes the use of religion to support nationalist ideologies. These theories, which link the Jewish people, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish state, are sometimes oriented toward a more specific ideology associated with the religious right and Greater Israel” (Maniv & Benziman, Israel Studies, 25/2, 2020).
For many, it still seems inconceivable that a state founded on the memory of the worst genocide in history could itself be accused of committing one. Yet scholarship in genocide studies shows societies shaped by collective trauma are not inherently immune from reproducing similar dynamics. Serbia, for example, carried out two campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and Kosovo, targeting its Muslim populations, in areas tied to historic battles. One such site was Gazimestan, where Serbia’s defeat in 1389 led to Ottoman rule. That loss became the foundation of a national myth, sustaining the belief that Kosovo and Bosnia—despite being inhabited for centuries by other ethnic majorities—were ancestral Serbian lands unjustly seized by Muslims (M.R. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, 1996).
For religious Zionists—and for revisionist Zionists or Israel’s right-wing Likud, who rely on their support—the return of the Jewish people to their land, understood to include the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Greater Israel), is seen as a prophetic event confirming God’s election and fidelity to the Jews. The Gaza war, together with the favorable stance of the Trump administration and its Western allies, is regarded as a historic opportunity to bring this vision closer to fulfillment, even at the cost of setting aside existing rules, agreements, and values grounded in international norms. In this perspective, the realization of a “Greater Israel”—now on the verge of realization—is portrayed as ending two thousand years of diaspora and humiliation, while giving rise to a new narrative: that of Jewish power.
Cover photo: A picture shows a view of a damaged facade of the Holy Family Church, a day after it was hit in an Israeli strike, in Gaza City on July 18, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
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